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Monday, August 3, 2015

Unqualified

The inspector general for the government’s intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III, has found that some of the 30,000 Clinton e-mails turned over to the State Department contain classified material. Taking a random sample of 40 e-mails, he found four with classified information — material that was classified at the time it was sent and that was extremely vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence agencies. A fifth e-mail concerning the 2012 Benghazi attack that left an ambassador and three other Americans dead is already public and appears to have contained classified information. In all likelihood, there are many more.

All this led McCullough to refer the matter to the Justice Department as a “potential compromise of classified information.” Not so long ago, the government took that sort of thing seriously. The U.S. Criminal Code states, with regard to documents or materials containing classified information: “It is a crime to knowingly remove such documents without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.” David Petraeus, the former CIA director and Army general, pled guilty just this year to mishandling classified information after storing sensitive CIA data in an unlocked desk drawer at his home in Arlington, Va. If a desk in a house in Virginia is an unauthorized location, a server in a house in Hillary Clinton’s New York home is one, too.

Nathan Sales, a former official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security under President Bush, wrote last week here on National Review’s website:

The Clinton e-mails are potentially more troubling than the Petraeus affair. Digital espionage can be much more harmful than spying in the analog world. If Chinese or Russian spies wanted to copy the retired general’s black books, they would have had to mount a costly and risky operation to break into his house undetected. But hackers can compromise information on an e-mail server from anywhere on the planet, with just a few keystrokes.

Team Clinton is asserting that “any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.” But that is flatly contradicted by the State Department. Hillary can plead ignorance as to what was sent to her on her private e-mail account, but, as the liberal Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized this week: “Clinton seeks to become president and commander in chief, but if McCullough’s findings are correct, she was at best inattentive about her handling of intelligence secrets when she was secretary of state even as she worked to shield her activities from public view. If that’s not a disqualification from the White House, it’s hard to imagine what is.”